Dividends Lost
NYTimes – Four groups of people were directly affected by the Federal Reserve’s decision late last week to allow major banks to increase their dividends and to buy back shares. Bankers, bank shareholders and government officials were somewhere between happy and delighted.
Taxpayers, the fourth group, should be much more worried (see this cautionary letter to The Financial Times by top finance academics).
The bankers’ reaction is obvious. They are officially released from the financial hospital ward that was set up for them in 2008. No matter that this was a very comfortable place, with few conditions relative to any other bailout in recent American or world history, there were still restrictions on what banks could do and bank executives chafed at these constraints.
In particular, banks were required to build the equity in their business –- insolvency is avoided, after all, while there is positive equity in a business. When shareholder equity is exhausted, creditors face losses.
